Two Practical Strategies to Manage Social Anxiety
By Peggy Loo, PhD
I’ve been working on changing some habits. In the last month, I’ve been trying to create good habits - like setting aside food scraps for a compost drop off site, and break bad habits - like checking my work email on weekends. As a psychologist who specializes in anxiety disorders, it got me thinking about how anxiety can feel like a bad habit you want to break. This is not meant to be a reductionist view of anxiety. Anxiety is a multifaceted experience with complex etiology, and treatment for anxiety should always be holistic. That being said, the analogy of anxiety as a bad habit is helpful insomuch as we can do something about bad habits. We weren’t born with them, meaning we can learn and encourage new ones.
What is the definition of social anxiety?
Social anxiety is the specific worry of negative evaluation from others in a social situation, which ends up causing emotional and/or physical distress. Social anxiety isn’t synonymous with a lack of social skills, nor does it have to do with an introverted versus extroverted personality type. Some of the most affable and extroverted people I know struggle with social anxiety. Some of the “quiet” types I know socialize easily and without self-consciousness. That means social anxiety does not present itself one way, and it may not be obvious to an observer. Again, it has to do with an internal preoccupation that others may negatively perceive you.
With social anxiety in particular, it can feel as if external factors (e.g., the number of people at a function, how familiar you are with who’s there, whether the context is a romantic one, etc) are the main contributors to your anxiety. However, being a cognitive-behavioral psychologist, I’m always interested in figuring out how what we do affects how we think/feel - and vice versa. What if you are unintentionally doing something in social scenarios that actually creates anxiety (or more of it) for you? What if the series of things you do become a habit, thereby making a self-fulfilling prophecy that you become anxious in social situations?
Common signs of social anxiety
Interestingly enough, whenever I work with someone with social anxiety, similar patterns emerge. This is true regardless of who the person is or the social situations they struggle most with. First off, usually when a person is worried about a social situation, they will try a number of actions to control and decrease their anxiety. These are called safety behaviors. Safety behaviors are any action used to minimize anxiety (and make you feel more “safe”.) For example, you might feel stressed going to a birthday party with a lot of unfamiliar faces. To manage your anxiety about having to chit chat with strangers, you only talk to the handful of people you know. Other safety behaviors could include ordering another drink, pretending to check your phone, limiting eye contact, or excusing yourself to find food or the bathroom when honestly, you’re neither hungry nor in need. While you might do any of these things simply because you’re bored at the party, it becomes a safety behavior when your motivation for doing them is to control your anxiety. Safety behaviors often bring short-term relief and operate like a security blanket. The problem with safety behaviors is that investing in them legitimizes the worry you have (and you will believe you always need to do them to feel okay). Chronically limiting your contact with new people at every party only reinforces the idea, across multiple experiences, that social situations are threatening and that people will inevitably be judgmental or think poorly of me. Since you have no opportunity to experience and learn any differently, your social anxiety calcifies, making it more likely you’ll be stressed for the next party, where you will likely repeat the same tactics. And so on and so forth.
Another pattern I often see in social anxiety is some version of “negative post-event instant replay”. Like the sports commentators at the Olympic games whose job it is to remark on every aspect of an athlete’s performance frame-by-frame, in slow motion - we often review our interactions after a social experience with painful detail. Do you find that once you arrive home, you immediately go over moments in order to scrutinize them? Is your focus on trying to discern if someone disliked you, or if you did something to warrant judgment? This type of negative instant replay is incredibly common and rarely productive. Instant replay becomes an opportunity for us to selectively splice decontextualized moments we deem as important and do a bit of unfair mind reading, resulting in - you guessed it, more social anxiety (and more future frame-by-frame analyses).
As you can see, small actions can become habits that fuel anxiety, and anxiety itself can take on a habitual flavor. So what can we do? Knowing that social anxiety is actually less about others and more to do with your patterns of behavior is a great start. It automatically puts the ball in your court - as you can always try new things. Here are two strategies to try instead of safety behaviors and negative post-event instant replay.
Two tips to overcome social anxiety
1. Practice noticing your surroundings.
Focus outward, instead of on your level of anxiety or on safety behaviors to control your anxiety. Folks with strong social anxiety often have difficulty remembering details about what was around them when they’re socializing because their best energy was spent inwardly focused, monitoring themselves! Pay attention to what people are saying and get into (or listen) to a conversation you find interesting. Pick out what you like or dislike about the environment or event that you’re at or a funny moment you want to share later with a friend. It can be positive or negative - but paying attention more broadly helps you to be present to the situation rather than overly focused on yourself. You may need to remind yourself to refocus outward repeatedly, as old habits are not easily quashed and new ones take practice!
2. Plan for when you get home.
If you often comb through your experience as if you were going to rate yourself after a social situation, plan to do something different when you get home (or even before that when you’re on the train, in the cab, etc). Our lives should not be relegated to a snapshot moment, and evaluating yourself via instant replay makes your life about performance, rather than connection when you’re with others. Habits decrease in strength when we throw wrenches into the usual works. Plan to do something different - anything else will do! Watch tv, text a friend to see how their night went, catch up on laundry, make dinner, think about next weekend - choose to put your mind towards moving forward, not rewinding and reviewing.
Start small. Since I work with a number of high-achieving patients, they often want to completely eradicate or reverse bad habits once they’re identified. I listen to what their plan is when they want to try something new and (usually) tell them to halve or even quarter it. Habits started with one repeated action, and can change with one repeated action.
About the Therapist: Dr. Peggy Loo is a cognitive-behavioral psychologist who loves watching her dog’s quirky habits. Popular ones include yoga-like stretching first thing every morning (warrior pose), sleep barking during teletherapy sessions, and putting himself to bed every night.